Yes , there can be life after being caught smoking pot in a pipe. Since drowning in water is the second leading cause for accidental death in children and we are going into summer when kids tend to drown, we should dust off a really good American swimmer to help kids stay alive. So, bring back Michael Phelps. He did win 16 Gold Medals at some Olympics.

Three months from now he will resurface and will participate in the summer Olympics in London. The last time we saw a lot of him was when he made history and won 8 Gold Medals in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics. He already experienced then the world wide awe and popularity so why do it again? Well, when you have been doing something all your life, why not do it again.

The last three years has been the most difficult of his entire career. It didn’t help when he was photographed at a party in January 2009 taking a good long inhale of a marijuana pipe that seemed to circulate world wide. That one photo tarnished his image and he admits that the pot represented the lowest point in his career. He instantly went from the role model squeaky clean muscular award winning swimmer to pot head looser look the other way kids. After that his passion for swimming appeared to have faded.

Now he seems to approach the last lap of a career by once again training hard with another Olympics within sight. He is ready to make history again by trying to win the most Olympic medals won by one person ever. Yes, rather than hanging out and sleep late and play video games all day, he is getting up early again and going to the pool for a workout even after 16 years of training.

He is more committed to the training now because it has finally been his decision to swim. Before winning the last 8 medals, he felt he had to win. Now he wants to win and has begun weight training to be included in his training sessions. He has been rejuvenated and physically he has become more powerful than he was in Beijing. Gone is the grumpy disinterested swimmer from the past few years. His coach says that last year on a scale of 1-10 he was a 2 and now he is functioning at a nine.

After Beijing he stopped training and started living by partying and had to make the hard decision to participate in the summer Olympics in London in 2012. The press was following him everywhere and since he really wasn’t swimming any more he was just being a target for some cameraman searching for another embarrassing photo. After the pot smoking photo emerged he was suspended from competition for three months by U.S. A. swimming.

It wasn’t till March 2009 that he made a decision about the next Olympics. He was apathetic about training, lazy, unmotivated. In the fall of 2009 he missed enough days of training to add up to months. In the summer of 2010 he disappeared for a weekend just before the Nationals and they found him in Vegas partying. Maybe he thought that movie the Hangover was some kind of training video.

So, to make up for his partying his coach has him working out in one of those stationary pools with the dial that increases the water force to swim against. He also has a chamber that he sleeps in at night that simulates high altitude in order to improve his endurance. He sleeps at a air pressure comparable to being 9,000 feet in the air. He is now 26 years old and feels that he doesn’t recover as fast as he used to from the water pressure. His coach feels that he can still win a multiple of Gold Medals in London this summer and that everything he does now will be compared to what he accomplished in the summer of 2008.

He has a total of 16 Medals from Athens and Beijing. He is just 3 medals shy from breaking the record for most Olympic career medals. There is a soviet gymnast that currently holds the record. She is convinced that Michael will surpass her record. They met recently for a photo shoot.

Other photo shoots include sexy poses with model Bar Refaeli for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. He is in demand again and appeared during fashion week in New York and Paris. He now has added 7 sponsors including Head and Shoulders and it is estimated he has made $40 Million dollars so far over his career. There is also a Michael Phelps video game that is a swimming race that forces people to get off the couch. He also has a Foundation that is teaching thousands of kids how to swim many in urban neighborhoods. So, put down the pipe and start achieving. Michael got his second chance and is swimming all the way to the bank with it.